The Outokumpu Kemi Mine - FLAC3D analysis (Itasca Consultants AB - Sweden)

The Outokumpu Kemi Mine is located in the north of Finland and has an annual production of 2.7 million tonnes of chromite ore. It was started in 1968 and mining was initially conducted in open pits, going underground with sublevel stoping in year 2003. Current mining areas are soon depleted, and mining will continue below current mining area at 500 m depth.
Extraction of the crown pillars between the open pits and the mined areas (that are up to 75 m thick) is one possibility for future mining. The consequences on the pit wall stability and nearby critical infrastructure were studied. The work included data compilation of rock mass and numerical stress analysis in FLAC3D.
The method for mining below 500 m depth is not yet decided, but sublevel caving is suggested. The caveability of the ore and hangingwall, stability of infrastructure during mining, stability of other orebodies, and influence on ground surface were studied. The work included rock mass data compilation, empirical assessment of caveability, numerical stress analysis in FLAC3D, cave flow modelling with CAVESIM.

Modelling flow and transport in fractured rocks, based on DFN approaches- (Itasca Consultants SAS - France)

Itasca Consultants, through its joint R&D laboratory with the University of Rennes and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, collaborates with the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company SKB to develop alternative Discrete Fracture Network based approaches for modelling flow and contaminant transport in crystalline rocks.
In crystalline rocks, flow and transport through the rockmass take place only if there is a connected path of open fractures between hydraulically active boundaries. Hence, the rockmass is represented as a network of discrete fractures (DFN). Flow and transport DFN modelling capacities are implemented in the numerical plateform DFN.lab developed by the joint laboratory. Recently, advective transport modelling has been implemented, based on a particle tracking approach. With this method flow lines can be computed (Figure 1 and Figure 2) and post-processed to derive transport indicators such as breakthrough curves, travel times, tortuosity, transport resistance. The project objective is to assess the risk associated to contaminant transport from deep storage to surface from different DFN models conditioned to available data.

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